Author: Jack Scott

Why I Blog

I’ve been ‘blogging’ now for over two years (I wrote my first post on May 13th, 2006). Not all of that time has been on this web server, but what now constitutes the majority has been. I’ve started to wonder, since I realised last week that it had been that long, about why it is exactly that I blog.

When I started this wondering, I wasn’t really sure why it was. I couldn’t put my finger on it. So I turned the question around. Why do other people blog? And why do I read their blogs? I was sure, if I could answer those two questions, the answer to my original question would become much more apparent.

A ‘blog’, the now common shortening of web log, is basically a series of web pages arranged in reverse chronological order with an RSS feed attached. They are mostly personal, that is, written by a person rather than a group or corporation. We are now seeing group blogs, that is, blogs with multiple authors from a certain group, such as Debian or WordPress. But they are still written from an individual’s perspective

So why is it that blogs appeal to the person rather than to the group? A lot of people have speculated, and I agree with them, that it is because groups have other means of being heard. A large newspaper (a group, as it were) can have an amazing impact on how we see information. A news channel on TV, or a respected journal, can also have an impact on how we see information. Anybody who disagrees probably hasn’t read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. An individual has nowhere near this much sway on how people think. Barack Obama, president of the U.S., and that dude that runs the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke are arguably the two most powerful people on the face of the planet. And yet CNN has much more sway over people than them.

It’s not because people don’t want to be heard. It’s quite the opposite, in fact. I know quite a few people with huge egos who would love to have a sway on how people act. I’m probably one of them. It’s that they can’t be heard. One person funding, writing, editing, publishing, and distributing a major newspaper, every single day of their life? Unheard of! A blog allows people to have a say, even if their say is only a little drop in the blogging ocean. And they can be heard. Some of them have quite a bit of say. The technology has emerged in the last five years for people to claim back the popular media, and they have jumped at the chance.

As an aside, a blog isn’t the only way in which people are claiming back the media. Podcasts are another big way in which information is now being transmitted, all free of charge.

People (I think) also blog for different reasons. We aren’t all egotistical maniacs, after all. Sometimes it’s to help other people out. A website is a great way of distributing information, and a blog makes it really easy to do so. So easy, in fact, I could probably teach my grandmother to do it. Take, for instance, my own blog. Thousands of two people are reading my operating system development tutorials. They’re not brilliant, but they are helping people. Some people write about how to draw, or write, or even how to blog.

There’s one more reason why I think people blog. And that is that everybody else is. Like the iPod, the blog is now a fad, a trendy thing that makes you cool (I don’t have an iPod. I’m not cool. I rest my case). Over the last few years, numbers of blogs have exploded. I don’t remember seeing many at all back in the early part of this decade, but now they are here in the hundreds of thousands.

But it makes you wonder. Who else reads all these hundreds of thousands of blogs? Well, for a start, other bloggers. It creates networks of blogs. Blogrolls link together people from across the globe, all vaguely interested in the same thing. And there’s the other thing. There’s somebody interested in even the strangest things, because otherwise those strange things wouldn’t exist.

So there we have it, I think. Other people blog because they have something to say, want to say it, and want to be cool like everybody else. That sounds fair enough to me. I’m much the same.

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Writing Emails to “People”?

I was reading this post by Seth Godin today which made me think about how we communicate through letters today.

In summary, his posts teaches how to send a personal email. It’s a valuable skill, and due to the volume of automated email (and spam!) that we get daily, it’s starting to become something of a lost skill. I’m lucky to get one personal email a day. Some weeks I get none at all.

Once I read Seth’s post, I sat down and wrote an email to one of my friends. My email was a few paragraphs long, maybe 200 words or so. The response I got back was a single line, probably under 100 characters. It was as if I had just been sent an SMS via email. And then I realised; that was the usual medium of communication for my friend.

Which makes me feel a bit sad, for a couple of reasons. We read stories all the time about people in the early days, before the Internet (gasp!) who wrote letters to each other constantly. Around ANZAC day here in Australia, we get reminded a lot of the soldiers in the world wars who wrote letters to their loved ones, basically just to tell them they were still alive. Seeing as it took weeks or months for the letters to get home, it must have been a powerful experience to get a letter.

It also makes me sad because my friend didn’t take the time to write a full letter back. That’s not how text messages work. With a text message, it’s say a sentence, other person replies, say something else, reply, and so on. It can go on for days, wasting everybody’s time and money. I don’t like this, and I think it needs to change.

I’ve tried sending out personal emails to other people as well, both after reading Seth’s post and before. Half the time, I didn’t even get a reply. Now that’s just rude.

9 Things To Never Do On A Forum

  1. Not Googling before posting. This doesn’t apply to all forums, but where it does, you had better do it right, otherwise you’re going to get put in your place rather quickly. You’ll be probably be told to ‘search the fucking web’ or STFW.
  2. Not reading the manual before posting. Again, this doesn’t apply in all situations, but where it does, it does in a big way. You’re likely to get ‘read the fucking manual’ or RTFM as a response if you don’t.
  3. Evade a temporary ban. If you’ve been given a ban, you’ve got it for a reason. Evading the ban (by registering another username, changing email address, etc) is only likely to cause being kicked out again, this time more severely and more permanently.
  4. Start insulting other people personally. It’s fine to disagree. Disagreement causes wonderful arguments that everybody can learn from. Letting that disagreement turn into a personal flame war only causes misery for everybody. And probably a warning from the moderators too.
  5. Not use [code] tags for putting code in. It’ll make you look really, really dumb. Enough said. If you don’t know if the forum supports code tags or you can’t find them, point that out. At least then you have an excuse, and you can do it next time.
  6. Tell somebody their hard work is crap without telling them why. If you have enough of an opinion to tell somebody it’s complete crap, tell them why as well. Otherwise it’ll never get any better. This is especially important if you’re a regular and the initial poster is a newbie, because it reflects badly on the whole community. And thus…
  7. If you’re in a high position in the community, don’t conspire against it. You don’t need to be a moderator to be in a high position. You might have a high post count, or lots of people might mention your (user)name. Whatever it is that places you in that position (or appearance of a high position), don’t abuse it. It will reflect badly on the entire community to outsiders or newbie.
  8. Take over somebody else’s thread for having an argument with a third person. The only exception to this is if the argument is on the exact same topic. If a poster asks “which is better, red or blue?” and then you start discussing the merits of yellow and green, it’s rude and off-topic.
  9. Talk conclusively about something you have no clue about. It will only lead the conversation off-topic (at best) and is likely to confuse the other posters no end.

Do you have any ideas for a tenth item for the list? What is your pet peeve on forums?

Hack of the Year

As you might have noticed, I’ve switched back to using WordPress (again), and managed to dig up all my old blog posts (most of which are utter crap). At the moment I’m using the lighttpd web server, and I had to play around a bit with mod_rewrite in order to get the pretty URLs working. In the end I got lazy and just settled for a hack I found on the Internet. And as a hack, it’s pretty epic.

server.error-handler-404 = "/index.php?error=404"

What it does is thus: when you click on a page in the blog (such as http://www.jackscott.id.au/2009/04/hack-of-the-year), it searches for a folder named 2009 on my web server. That doesn’t exist, so it produces an HTTP 404 error (which means the page doesn’t exist). The rule above (pasted into the lighttpd configuration file) redirects all 404 errors to the index.php file. And this file (as the WordPress main file) just happens to know where to find the page requested. Truly a monumental hack.

The only downside to using this configuration is that Statpress (my favourite WordPress plugin) no longer works properly. It reports the correct number of page views and so on, but all pages requested are listed as ‘error=404‘. Not very useful when you want to see which pages are viewed the most.

But nevertheless, a pretty cool thing.

Review: Telstra Prepaid Wireless Broadband

Recently I just started house-sitting a house with no Internet connection at all. As a member of the generation who just refuse to be out of touch at any point in time, I needed a way to get the Internet. I’ve house-sat at the same place before, and in previous times I’ve experimented with no-contract dialup services (which turn out to be unreliable and expensive), using my mobile phone as a 3G modem (which worked fine until somebody rang or sent an SMS), and scanning the neighbourhood for open wireless networks (of which there are none, sadly).

So, this time, in an effort to remain connected for the duration of the stay (2 weeks), I’ve purchased myself a prepaid wireless broadband USB dongle, courtesy of Telstra. For those of who don’t know how these things work, they are basically a device (looks a little bit like a flash drive) that plugs into your USB port, connects to the mobile phone network, and lets your computer talk to the mobile network as if it was a phone. More specifically, it allows you to access the Internet via the mobile phone network and send and receive SMSs.

The Telstra Prepaid Wireless Broadband dongle costs around $150AUD retail, and with this you get $10 included credit (which isn’t much at all, trust me). For $89 you get 4GB of data usage, which is a fair hunk, and more than enough for most people just doing browsing and so on. It easily lasted me two weeks of browsing, email checking, Skype video calls (about 3 hours a day) and the occasional small download.

The box it comes in is the same rough size as a DVD case, but a bit thicker. It’s mostly empty space, but there is a manual (which actually tells you most of the things you need to know) as well as an extension cable for the dongle (roughly about 50cm long). The rest of it is filled with not-so-environmentally-friendly foam.

Installation was fairly simple, once I read the instruction manual. First of all I just tried plugging in the device (which picked up as a CD-ROM drive, auto installed some drivers, and then brought up a window with a ‘Connect’ button). This didn’t work. After reading the installation manual I found I had to ring Telstra to activate the SIM card. After doing this, the connect button worked as normal, and I could get on the Internet just fine. It works much like a 56k dialup modem, but with a custom interface.

On the night I bought the device, I couldn’t be bothered ringing Telstra to activate the SIM card. So I experimented with taking the SIM card out of my mobile phone (also a Telstra SIM) and stuck it in the dongle (it’s a fairly easy process to change the SIM card). To my surprise, it worked. I was then able to use the significant amount of browsing credit I had on my phone’s SIM card to browse the Internet on my laptop. A handy feature, I think.

Telstra (or rather, ZTE, the manufacturers of the actual device) had a few more handy tricks up their sleeves. On the side of the dongle is a slot to put a MicroSD card into. I wondered what it was for. This is a modem, not a camera. On reading the manual, I read that it is so you can turn the dongle into a USB flash drive as well (though it only supports up to 4GB cards). Cool idea, though I’ll probably never use it.

The software that Telstra have devised to control the dongle (connect, disconnect, send SMS, see credit, etc) is all proprietary custom-written stuff. While I hate it when companies do that (what’s wrong with using Windows’ dialup connection manager?), Telstra have actually managed to do it well this time. The software only starts when you plug in the device, there are limited things to go wrong (but you are still able to change the most important options), and it stays out of your way on the taskbar while you’re browsing the Internet. Compared to some of their older efforts at wireless broadband connection software (which I used to set up as part of my job occasionally), this software is brilliant.

In addition to that, ZTE have actually bothered to sign their drivers. If you’ve read my review of the PreSonus AudioBox, you’ll know how much unsigned drivers piss me off. They have also distributed updates to the drivers via Windows Update. This is a miracle; the number of smaller hardware companies bothering to do this is far too few.

I’ve been using this device for the last two weeks as my sole Internet connection. I was located in the suburbs of Hobart (where mobile coverage is fairly good), though I experienced three dropouts during that time (mostly during the peak evening time). Speed is fairly good. According to speedtest.net, I got 1840kb/s downstream from a server in Melbourne, and 384kb/s upstream.

Overall, I’m very impressed with this device. While the data is hugely expensive for the amount you get, that’s the only problem I can pick with this device. Other than that, it’s a well thought out, well implemented piece of hardware, backed up by some good software and a decent user manual. 4.5 stars.

Update 21/11/09:  You might also be interested in my look at various high data-usage mobile phone plans, here.